Bookalicious

From Goodreads: Georgia knows what it means to keep secrets. She knows how to ignore things. She knows that some things are better left unsaid. …Or are they?

When Georgia and her best friend, Riley, travel along with nine other suburban Pennsylvania kids to Anapra, a squatters’ village in the heat-flattened border city of Juarez, Mexico, secrets seem to percolate and threaten both a friendship and a life. Certainties unravel. Reality changes. And Georgia is left to figure out who she is outside the world she’s always known.

Beth Kephart paints a world filled with emotion, longing, and the hot Mexican sun.

I will be forever indebted to @myfriendamy at My Friend Amy’s Blog for putting together this impromptu blog tour of this book. I am so in love with Beth Kephart and am moving on to House of Dance as soon as I am done writing this review.

I cannot say enough about Kephart’s character development. So much depth in so few pages. It is almost too much to handle. You see the Mexican plains and the children in their brightly colored clothing. You can feel the despair and the realization that not everyone has it as good as us. Riley and Georgia are amazing characters and if not fictional would have grown up to change the world in some major way.

This book was chalk full of so many amazing and demanding prose I am for the first time going to quote some of my favorite passages from a book here.

Panic, I’m telling you, begins in the heart. Panic is big buzzard wings banging wretched and trapped against the bones of your ribs, knocking your windpipe loose, swiping your logic. Pg. 42

“So you are taking pictures for prosperity?” Kev said. “For posterity,” I said. Dad laughed. Now I turned teh camera on Mom and Kev. She’s smiling in the photograph. Kev’s looking half surprised. Pg.76

“It’s weird,” I said. “I know. You wouldn’t think it just to see us. She being so petite. Me like the Jolly Green Giant.” “The Heart is not a size,” Sophie said after looking between Riley’s face and mine and saying nothing for a long time.Pg.233

I cannot urge you enough to read this thought provoking and stimulating novel. I promise it is one you will not be able to put down. I leave you with Beth Kephart reading a passage from her story.